As a result, nuclear winter remains a threat. The fireball ignites everything far beyond the blast effects. Rhodes noted that people fear the blast and radiation effects of atomic bombs, but it's really the fires that are most destructive. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear 'ahead,' even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use-all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. America's current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix-all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. But our government keeps looking for reasons to keep them, and maintaining the current much reduced arsenal still costs $50 billion a year. Most Americans, he's found, think that we don't have nuclear weapons any more, and that may reflect a realistic perception that we no longer need them. In this century only North Korea has tested bombs, and those could be the last explosions. He also noted how the number of tests dropped from decades of intensity to near zero after 1993. Rhodes commented that seeing the bomb tests on a world map over time shows how much they were a strange form of communication between nations. The total is shocking to most people-2,053. The evening began with a short version of Isao Ishimoto's animation of all the world's atomic explosions in the period 1945 to 1998.

A hole in the world richard rhodes